A release candidate of Ark Linux 2005.2 has been released, featuring KDE 3.5 Beta 1. Ark Linux is a very KDE centric desktop Linux distribution, aimed at making Linux easily usable to everyone while remaining technically sane. Aside from the move to KDE 3.5, this release features even more KDE integration including OpenOffice.org KAddressBook integration, and the usual round of speedups and bugfixes.

The Ark Linux team are planning to release 2005.2 final at the same time as KDE 3.5 is released.

We are also looking for some additional developers to help finishing some related projects - if you are interested, please email us or join #arklinux on irc.freenode.net

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* Somehow the installer would not allow me to continue without indicating a mountpoint for all of my 8 partitions

* The installer would also not allow 2 swaps (complaining about 2 identical mountpoints) It would also not let me remove one of the swap mountpoints. I had to fire up the built-in qtparted and format my second swap as something else before I could continue

* It nuked my existing grub in the mbr, and replaced it by a non-working one

* I chose en_UK as language in the installer but don't have had that choice for kde in kpersonalizer.

* Somehow kpersonalizer was half

* Networking did not work, my chip is non-exotic (8139too module), launching that network-config tool eventually made the interface up and fetched an ip from my dhcp server

* I never was asked for setting the root password, nor did I get an explanation why it would be unnecessary

* The installer failed to set up my screen correctly (19" CRT), I got 1024x768 at 75Hz

* The ampersand (at) key does not work, even though I set up my keyboard as usual (fr_CH), and it is correct im xorg.conf, and keyboard layouts are disabled in kde

> Somehow the installer would not allow me to continue without
> indicating a mountpoint for all of my 8 partitions

It wasn't really designed for systems with hundreds of partitions ;) But I've
fixed this in SVN --> will be fixed in the next release.

> The installer would also not allow 2 swaps (complaining about 2
> identical mountpoints) It would also not let me remove one of the swap
> mountpoints. I had to fire up the built-in qtparted and format my second
> swap as something else before I could continue

Same as for the first item

> It nuked my existing grub in the mbr, and replaced it by a
> non-working one

Any idea why it didn't work for you? It's clear that we overwrite the mbr,
but so far we didn't get any reports of our grub not working.
Maybe the grub.conf generator somehow got confused by the many
partitions; do you have a copy of the grub.conf it generated?

> I chose en_UK as language in the installer but don't have had that
> choice for kde in kpersonalizer.

Strange, works here...

> Somehow kpersonalizer was half

Are you sure you didn't click "Finish" in between? It's definitely complete on
all boxes I've tried.

> Networking did not work, my chip is non-exotic (8139too module),
> launching that network-config tool eventually made the interface up and
> fetched an ip from my dhcp server

The DHCP client for unconfigured network cards times out after 1 second
in order to keep bootup fast for non-networked boxes and boxes on
networks without DHCP servers.
Apparently your DHCP server is too slow.
We're thinking about increasing this timeout to 2 seconds because we've
had several reports of this.

> I never was asked for setting the root password, nor did I get an
> explanation why it would be unnecessary

> The installer failed to set up my screen correctly (19" CRT), I got
> 1024x768 at 75Hz

Yes, currently it sets up every screen for 1024x768 because too many displays send completely wrong DDC/EDID information. We're still looking for a reliable way to tell if the EDID information is valid.

> The ampersand (at) key does not work, even though I set up my keyboard
> as usual (fr_CH), and it is correct in xorg.conf, and keyboard layouts are
> disabled in kde

That sounds like a bug in the xorg keytables then... Where should it be? I only have de_CH, de_DE and us keyboards to test with...

> In kpersonalizer, I eventually chose en_US, en_UK was definately not
> available. I installed only from the 1st cd, maybe that's a reason...

Right... Now that you mention it we removed the kde-i18n-British package from the main CD for diskspace reasons (hardly as important as the other kde-i18n packages because anyone who can speak en_GB can speak en_US and vice versa ;) ).

> The problem is (hd0,0), it should have been (hd0,5) in my case.

Hmm, and (hd0,0) is a / partition of another Linux distro, right?
The installer figures out the location of kernel images etc. by running

Which will, of course, find any partition with /boot/grub/stage1
We're doing it this way because using a different way, it's hard to figure out the right ID on mixed IDE/SATA/SCSI systems.
Guess looking for /boot/kernel-* (with * being our kernel version) instead of just /boot would work better -- changing that in the next version.

We'll also add the option to install grub into the partition rather than the MBR (though only in expert mode). 2005.2 is the first version with the expert mode -- that's why this simply hasn't mattered before.

>> In kpersonalizer, I eventually chose en_US, en_UK was definately not
>> available. I installed only from the 1st cd, maybe that's a reason...

>Right... Now that you mention it we removed the kde-i18n-British package from the >main CD for diskspace reasons (hardly as important as the other kde-i18n packages >because anyone who can speak en_GB can speak en_US and vice versa ;) ).